


LadybugSingsOpera

by Lady_Scarlet_of_the_Dells



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien is not a model, Adrinette, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Classical Music, F/M, Gabriel is not famous, LadyNoir - Freeform, Marichat, ladrien
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 06:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7211480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Scarlet_of_the_Dells/pseuds/Lady_Scarlet_of_the_Dells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marinette Dupain-Cheng has always envisaged living a quiet life as a designer – but when she takes up singing on a whim, it turns out the world has a different plan for her.</p><p>Gabriel Agreste has also always envisaged being a designer – except he wants all the fame and fortune he can get. But with financial difficulty looming and his son Adrien already giving up his expensive private education, Gabriel decides the best way to increase business is to get the mysterious Ladybug, who shot to stardom seemingly overnight, to model his designs – but he has to find her first.</p><p>Meanwhile, Adrien has other ideas on how to save his father’s independent boutique…</p>
            </blockquote>





	LadybugSingsOpera

**Author's Note:**

> Just so you know: I have no idea where I'm going with this.....

It started with a piano, a camera, and a Marinette. It was just a music project for school that she wanted feedback on. She didn’t even do a second take, just posted her first attempt, mistakes and all, sitting in her ladybug onesie with her darkened, messy bedroom in the background.

How had it ended up like this?

She took a deep breath. The curtain would rise any second. She’d peeked out from backstage earlier – the theatre was full and buzzing. She wrung her shaking hands, cloaked in red spotted gloves that went to her elbow, matching her clingy off-the-shoulder dress. She was scared that she would open her mouth and no sound would come out. Instead of the proudest moment of her life so far, her first show would be the most mortifying.

Any second. Any second.

When the fabric in front of her began to move, the audience stilled. This was it, Marinette could feel the sudden silence screaming at her. This was it, the moment everyone in that sold-out theatre had been waiting for ever since LadybugSingsOpera had gone viral. The moment they would finally see the girl behind the hands on the piano, the girl behind the YouTube channel.

Marinette – Ladybug – bit her lip as she adjusted her mask one last time before the curtain rose high enough for everyone to see her face.

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expected, but the audience remained hushed. No reaction. Not a sound. The spotlight blinded her to any facial expressions she might otherwise have seen.

Behind her, the orchestra began to play. She counted herself in and opened her mouth.

*

The newspaper that landed in front of Gabriel Agreste did not draw his attention away from the bank statements he was reading until his son spoke.

“Father,” Adrien said. “Can I go to this concert?”

Gabriel glanced at the newspaper. The headline read YouTube Opera Star To Make First Appearance at the Bastille. He pushed it away and turned back to his statements. Adrien waited.

“Father? Can I go?”

His father held up one finger, eyes scanning the document before him, adding up numbers. Slowly, he shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Adrian. I don’t think we can afford it.”

“But Father… Without my tuition fees to pay anymore…”

Gabriel sighed. “Adrien… I’m afraid that barely begins to solve our problems. We’re still losing money every day.”  
Adrien echoed his father’s sigh and sat down opposite him. Sitting there, he hoped his father would glance back at the newspaper, read the article, or ask him why he wanted to see an opera singer. Gabriel did not. Gabriel acted as if he were not there. So he decided not to be there anymore.

But the newspaper remained there, and eventually Gabirel did glance at it. He pulled it towards him and scanned the lines of text beneath the headline. There was no picture to accompany the article; apparently there were no pictures of the siren’s face, but the mystery surrounding her identity only strengthened her allure. This Ladybug, as she was known, had attracted millions of fans in only a year on YouTube, and now she was on the front page and in the opera houses of Paris. She would be everywhere within no time. And yet within that same amount of time she had been nothing. A nobody. Like him. If only his designs could shoot to fame like she had. That would certainly solve all his problems.

If this girl could do it, why couldn’t he? He didn’t see how he could pull the anonymity stunt that she had, but… There must be a way. A way to get his designs out into the world, a way for people to see his clothes and want them. He needed better advertising. He couldn’t afford better advertising. He could barely afford any advertising.  
But maybe he didn’t need to. If he could get someone high-profile to wear his designs, all of France would want to wear them too. Someone who would be easy to persuade – someone with no contacts, no connections… Like Ladybug.

The sort of exposure that Ladybug would get in the coming months could save him.

*

Marinette had never sung in front of anyone else before. In fact, no one had ever heard her singing voice before she’d posted that first video. She’d taught herself first to sing and then to sing opera via internet tutorials while her parents were out, on their weekly date night. She was too embarrassed for anyone else to hear what she had assumed to be vastly out of tune wails. When their school music teacher had asked them to write the lyrics and music of a song they were to record and hand in, she had taken Alya with her to speak to the teacher, to try and get her to let her off the singing bit. The teacher had reassured her that she wasn’t really expecting any of them to be that good, but it hadn’t reassured Marinette one bit.

It was Alya who had suggested she post her recording on YouTube. “You’ll have a username, and you don’t have to show your face. No-one will know who it is. If you can survive random strangers on the internet hearing you sing, you can survive our teacher hearing you sing.”

At first she thought it was a terrible idea. But she couldn’t seem to explain to Alya that having other people listen to her wasn’t the problem – it was that she wanted so badly to be able to sing, that having her music teacher tell her the truth (that, despite all the time and effort she’d put into learning, she was terrible) sounded like the worst thing on earth. Her only other idea was to hire a singing tutor, but they probably wouldn’t know what to do with her, and the thought of wasting her money and the tutor’s time didn’t sound particularly pleasing. And of course with Alya not properly understanding the problem, this YouTube idea was the only other option. Except for submitting a recording without doing anything else with it, then curling up under her duvet for the rest of her life and hoping she’d never get the feedback.

She finally recorded her song three nights before the deadline. The act had an air of finality to it. There, the project is done. I need to stop worrying about it now. But she found she couldn’t simply put it to one side and call it finished. Was she sure there was nothing else she wanted to add? Was she sure she’d used the chords she wanted to use? Was she sure the melody sounded right?

In the end, the only thing for it was to get someone else’s opinion. She didn’t particularly want to admit to her parents that she’d invested all this time in something she was still terrible at – and completely in secret, too, for over two years. And Alya’s reactions were always over-the-top, so that was a no-go. There was no-one else she could think of who she wouldn't be embarrassed to go to and whose opinion she could trust. 

So she took Alya’s advice and made a YouTube channel.

She had trouble sleeping for nerves after she’d posted it, and when she woke up in the middle of the night, she went straight to her computer, resolute. She would take down her video and delete her channel, before anyone saw it. She wouldn’t wait until the internet trolls found it and made her feel worse about her voice than she already did. She wouldn’t wait for her video to be ignored and ignored and ignored until she’d worn herself down to her bones worrying, waiting for something – anything.

But what she found surprised her. Twenty-one views, four likes, and one comment. She braced herself for harsh words but found only encouragement and a smiley face. She went back to bed unconvinced she’d ever woken up, convinced she’d dreamed checking her computer.

Alas, the views, likes, and comment were still there in the morning, when sunshine and birdsong made everything seem much more real than they had seemed in the middle of the night. In fact, the statistics had multiplied. She now had thirty-four views and six likes, and someone else had added a second comment, reading “wish i cud sing like that <3”. She was almost shell-shocked.

Two days later, she handed in the assignment. She was strangely hopeful.

*

That afternoon, Adrien did his piano lesson, did a photoshoot for his father’s latest men’s collection, cleaned the store, set up new displays and made dinner for the two of them. It was only when he finally sat down that he remembered that the concert was that night. He had missed it. He had known he had would miss it, but he had hoped he would at least remember when it was. He didn’t know why he wanted to be thinking about it while it was happening. Nobody would know if he didn’t.

That was a lie. He would know. He would feel terrible for forgetting and not wishing he was there the whole time and –

He hadn’t wished Ladybug luck for her performance.

Shit shit shit shit, he thought as he launched himself off his bed to grab his laptop. Ladybug had already posted a video of part of her performance. He clicked on it.  
He smiled when the video loaded. There she stood, elegant and poised in the middle of the stage in a floor length off-the-shoulder dress that clung tightly down to her calves, where it flared out around her feet. It was red, spotted with black, as were her elbow-length gloves. Of course it was. He couldn’t help but laugh. She wasn’t going to change just because she was standing in front of people instead of a camera. He noted that she also wasn’t going to stop hiding behind things – though she had no piano to hide behind, she did wear a mask over the top half of her face. In fact, he noted that there wasn’t a piano there at all.

So this was Ladybug, then – short, kinda skinny, her skin pale and freckled. The camera zoomed into her face as she waited, listening to the orchestra, for her cue to sing. She had a pointed chin, delicate lips and big, long-lashed blue eyes that sparkled in the spotlight. Her mask concealed the shape of her nose and her cheekbones and her forehead, but despite that he knew that she was beautiful.

Her voice was even more breath-taking with the right acoustics to complement it and better quality recording equipment. He couldn’t quite work out how such a big voice could come from such a small body.

After listening to the song – a new one, the first original song Ladybug had performed since that very first video – clicking “like” and replaying it, he scrolled down to the comments. The top comment read _Congrats on your first show Ladybug, it was awesome! I waited outside the stage door to meet you for like an hour… Hope you’re ok! Love, your biggest fan XOXO_

 _Hi Ladybug_ , he wrote, _I didn’t make it to your performance but hope it went well! The new song is amazing, by the way!_ That didn’t even begin to express what he wanted to say, but decided it would do and pressed enter. His comment appeared immediately under the video, prefaced with his username – ChatNoir1998.

*

Singing in front of people didn’t turn out to be so bad. The spotlight was too bright to even see that there was a crowd there, so it was just like singing alone in her bedroom. Except a lot brighter than the evenings she tended to record her covers. And her ladybug onesie had been replaced by a ball gown. And the acoustics were completely different. And the audience could see her face, even if it was covered.

_They could see her face. They could see who she was, just a worthless little –_

She took her mind off it all by focussing on her posture, on the tone of her voice, on the notes that came out of her mouth. She focussed on keeping in time with the music and making sure she had enough air in her lungs. And so most of the time she forgot she even had an audience. But when the music stopped… Thunderous applause battered her eardrums. Her knees threatened to buckle. Her heart turned to lead. Her skin heated up – on top of her copious blushing, it was only when she wasn’t concentrating that she realized just how warm the spotlight was.

The standing ovation at the end of the concert was such a surprise that she forgot to breathe. As the lights dimmed just enough for her to see the crowd get to their feet, grins plastered on their faces, their hands clapping wildly, she put a hand to her chest and forced her lungs to expand. She escaped to her dressing room as soon as she could, having issued a few breathless thank yous.

Alone once again, she could finally let the tension that had taken possession of her body go. Her immaculate posture collapsed into a slouch and she closed her eyes, taking a good several minutes to simply stare at the backs of her eyelids and relish the cool, quiet air.  
Slowly, she reached up and undid her hair. It cascaded down her back and finally the ache in her scalp dissipated. She brushed it out with careful, smooth movements and tied it back into her usual pigtails. Her mask was next; it was a relief to not have to hide anymore. She took her time in wiping off the red lipstick and bright eyeshadow, transforming herself from a perfectly painted artwork back into plain little Marinette. It was strange to look at herself in the mirror, wearing the ladybug dress. Plain little Marinette would never wear something so showy.

When she had slipped back into the comfort of her own clothes and stowed her Ladybug outfit in her bag, she poked her head out of her dressing room and made sure none of the theatre staff were around when she sneaked out. She could hear chatter from the other side of the stage door, so she went through to the stage and out the main door. Though nobody saw her, she couldn’t help but worry that they would work out that a lone dark-haired girl exiting the theatre half an hour after everyone else must be Ladybug.  
And of course she was scared that the mask wasn’t enough. She was scared someone would see her, realise who she was, and follow her back home. And then she would never have the normal life she craved.

Mind you, though – Marinette was always scared.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you thought! As I said, I don't know where I'm going with this fic, so I might not carry on with it, but... We'll see :)


End file.
